Monday, June 21, 2010

As you may remember from my earlier postings, on of conditions on which you can get your degree at Poznan University of Technology is taking part in so call Software Development Studio course. Participating students learn how it is like to write a software in real project, where are deadlines, quite a big team, changing requirements, real communication problems, etc. It is the first real experience of students with business world.

Google has recently created their workspace mechanic, which addresses the most common problem that big adopters of Eclipse has - preferences management in corporate environments. I am very happy that someone has finally noticed this problem.

However, I am not happy with installing 3rd party software to manage all the preferences. More, I do not believe it is a correct way. Eclipse, as a great platform, should offer such a functionality without the need of installing non-Eclipse plugins.

That's why I am supervising the project called 'Extended Preferences'. It is at very early stage, we are not sure if it will be welcome by Eclipse Foundation, but if you have some specific requirement which you think we should implement, just let us know.

For now, we would like to satisfy following requirements:

ability to define during the development, which preferences can be exported

ability to define import strategy (override, merge or reset)

ability to create a set of preferences to distribute them amongst developers

ability to promote project preferences to workspace preferences

support preferences which can be shared across workspaces

help developers to use preferences correctly (implement change listeners!)

create migration tool

We are not sure if we will succeed, the project is at very early stage, but we are going to try hard.